Succulent Ramblings

I like to ramble on about my plants... and other things! My hope is to log the progress of plants and talk about my frustrations with others. So, tune in, turn on, or drop out (if you find it boring!)

Monday, February 19, 2024

Strange...

Sunday...

I like to get it written down when I have one of those strange experiences that I can only attribute to a message from the other side. I was in bed and woke up a few minutes before 3:00 a.m. this morning to the sound of flapping paper coming from the dining room. To give a more vivid description, it sounded like one of those giant tablets that you would have in front of an audience on an easel where you draw or make notes and then flip the giant page over to the next page. So it wasn't like the sound of a thin newspaper, which does sit on my dining room table often. It was the sound of a thick large sheet flapping. Anyway, I woke to that sound and my first thought was that my dining room fan had turned on to high and there was something sitting on the table flapping. The reason this thought came to mind was that when I went to bed and I went to shut off the light (which is a remote on the wall), I had to poke it a few times to get it to go off. So I thought perhaps I had accidentally hit one of the fan buttons and turned it on higher and didn't know it since the light had gone off. The flapping sound happened a couple of times and then it stopped, and of course my next thought was "did I just dream that?" But Pearl, who always sleeps beside me,  sat up on her princess pillow and was looking in that direction obviously also wondering what that sound was! So then I sat there a minute and thought what the hell would make that sound?? A few seconds later, it happened again.. flap flap, flap flap. So now my curiosity got the best of me and I got out of bed and went into the dining room and turned the light on. There was absolutely nothing that would have made a flapping sound, and the fan was on the usual slow speed. So the only explanation is that it was a sound made by one of my transitioned loved ones. Mom? Mark? I always want to figure out what something like this means, but I have the feeling that it mostly just means "I'm here, watching out for you". The psychic told me that Mark watches over me, told me that he often lays next to me when I'm in bed. It's kind of a comforting thought.

 

Monday

They didn't call me to work today, so I'll spend the day working with my plants.  We're going to have an extraordinarily warm week...today will be in the 50's and the coolest day of the week. So it will get me in the mood to get things repotted.  The little seed dome has a lot going on!  I think it's time to move the Desert Rose into its own pot for starters.  The tiny Rhipsalis (actually Pseudorhipsalis) seedlings are developing their first flat leaves:

Aren't those just the cutest little leaves??  As for my "mama" plant, I've decided I'm going to restart it.  In fact, it's hanging over the sink right now - I watered the shit out of it yesterday so it will be well hydrated when I chop it up today.  The thing is so severely potbound that it really does need a reboot.  And it has a huge Drimopsis bulb that showed up in there a couple years ago that needs to be extricated from the hard mass of soil.  It's the only one of its kind that I have (for some reason).  Here's what it looks like in there:


 

This is actually from a year or more ago and it's much denser now.  I will take a photo when I get it potted up on it's own...

And now a mystery.  In the seed dome, next to one of the two Haemanthus albifloss bulbs, is a tiny "tuft" of green...maybe moss??  I took a macro pic of it and this is what it looks like:

I have no idea what it is.  I figure there's a good chance it was some seed that was in the mix I used, which came from Dick of the DM club.  Maybe I'll send a photo of it to him and see if he might have seen something similar when planting in his mix...

Well, that's all for today.  If I don't stop here, I won't getting any plant "stuff" done!